


Made a Map of Your Stars

by cosmicmewtwo



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: F/M, glaring astronomical inaccuracies, inevitable Three Years fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-17 19:33:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5882815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicmewtwo/pseuds/cosmicmewtwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all of Earth's various disappointments—and Vegeta, to his credit, has catalogued many—its barren night sky is perhaps the most damning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Made a Map of Your Stars

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series of headcanons turned into drabbles strung together into something that I hope resembles a single, coherent story. Either way, thanks for reading!

Of all of Earth's various disappointments—and Vegeta, to his credit, has catalogued many—its barren night sky is perhaps the most damning.

From his bedroom window on the north face of the Capsule Corp compound, he can see only a sparse handful of stars spattered across the ecliptic, all of them blinking weakly through a thick atmosphere and thicker light pollution. Even with the sharp eyesight of a Saiyan, he can only resolve the brightest of them. He knows that farther out, outside West City, beyond the humans' messy urban settlements and their primitive incandescent lights, the stars appear truer to life. Here, they are faint and anemic and all but lost in the haze.

Still, he tries to focus his gaze on a particular point, a blank spot in an alien constellation whose shape means nothing to him. But something is there and he searches for it, even though he can't see it with the naked eye. He knows it's there because he's looked up at it from the surface of too many worlds to count. A compulsion at this point, like running his tongue across the edge of an aching tooth, just to feel the the familiar sting.

From this distance, it's still there.

 

x

 

“Have you been living in this room this whole time? Wow, I think my walk-in closet is bigger than this.”

Vegeta watches as Bulma turns in place to take in her surroundings. Not that there's much to take in—Vegeta lives in the smallest guest room in the Capsule Corp household, although “lives” is probably a strong word. If anyone were to comb through his personal affects looking for clues as to what sort of person he was, they would be disappointed in their findings: just a few sets of armour tucked away in the closet, some training clothes and civilian Earthling clothing folded in a wardrobe, and little else.

“Minimalist” might be a polite way to describe Vegeta's quarters; “spartan” might be more accurate.

“I was so busy dealing with the Namekians when you moved in that I didn't even really notice where you had hidden yourself,” she goes on. “You could have been living in the gravity room for all I knew. Wouldn't have surprised me, to be honest.”

Vegeta doesn't answer.

The room is bigger than anything he's lived in. He's lost count of the years he's spent packed away into cramped space-pods, stations, planetary bases and the like—the expansive rooms of Capsule Corp in comparison strike him as opulent—wasteful _,_ even. It's the type of palatial space Frieza would have approved of. That alone sets him on edge.

“I could set you up with a better room, Vegeta.”

“That won't be necessary.”

Bulma shrugs and turns toward Vegeta's bed—immaculately made, to military standards, _of course_ —and sets a bundle down on the sheets.

“Well, anyway, here's your new and improved armour,” she says, knocking her fist against it as if to prove her claim. “Should be better than whatever the hell you were wearing on Namek.”

Vegeta watches as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. He feels drawn to the subtle movement, and to the crooked grin that flashes across her lips.

The room somehow feels even smaller

 

x

 

The woman's hair is a shade of blue Vegeta's sure he's never seen on any species in any part of the galaxy. He can't help but notice it—can't help but watch the way it catches the sunlight, shining like water in the midsummer heat. He's suddenly reminded of the first time he arrived on Earth; back then he was struck by its gem-blue surface, how a planet so small could be swallowed up by so much ocean—a relative rarity in the galaxy. Only about a hundred other worlds in the planetary database even remotely resembled it.

Vegeta realizes he's been staring.

Bulma's sprawled out on a lounger in the garden, back to the sun, dressed in some sort of minimalist outfit that the humans usually consider swimwear. He didn't mean to stare, but he couldn't help but notice her when he stepped out of the gravity simulator. Part of him wonders why someone from such a frail species would expose that much vulnerable skin to a hot, midday sun.

Another, baser part of him is drawn to her exposed curves and he wonders about her in ways he quickly tries to ignore.

Bulma raises her head from where it rested against her arms, and pushes up her sunglasses.

“Take a picture, Vegeta,” she calls out to him, “It'll last longer.”

Vegeta doesn't understand the comment. 

“You're going to burn in this sun,” he retorts.

“Thanks for the concern,” she snorts. “I've got some tanning lotion on. I wouldn't worry about it.”

She winks and drops her sunglasses back over her eyes, resuming her prone position in the sun.

Vegeta glimpses at the sky, thinking that the woman is lucky that she lives on a planet with such a rich, protective atmosphere. Clear blue stretches out in every direction, the only barrier between them and and a universe full of things far worse than just a small star's ultraviolet radiation. He feels the sun beating down on himself, but it doesn't quite explain the heat crawling up his neck and face. In the corner of his eye, the bright blue of her hair is impossible to ignore.

He tries not to stare.

 

x

 

Vegeta wishes he were sleeping.

It's past midnight and he _can't_ sleep, because his sleeping routine is erratic, always has been—a lifetime spent planet-hopping across thousands of worlds and skipping from cramped ships to space stations and everywhere in between has destroyed any concept of a day-night cycle he ever had, and Earth in particular seems distinctly at odds with his own internal clock. His usual strategy has been to train well beyond the point of exhaustion, then collapse into what few hours of unconsciousness he can steal. Tonight that particular strategy has failed.

Ultimately, he decides to leave his quarters and make his way to the kitchen—after all, if he can't slake his insomnia, he can at least satisfy his hunger instead.

He isn't expecting to find the woman there.

She's seated at the head of the table, surrounded by a sprawling mess of papers. Her face is illuminated by the harsh glow of the laptop at her fingertips, her bright eyes ringed with dark circles that seem out of place with the softer features of her face. She taps irritably at her keyboard for several moments before finally noticing Vegeta, and startles at his sudden presence.

“Vegeta!” she exclaims. “Wow, didn't even hear you come in—you're up kinda late, huh?”

Vegeta glances at the wall clock hanging near the fridge. He's vaguely familiar with human time-keeping—enough to know that sunrise can't be far off now. “I could say the same to you.”

“Ha, yeah,” Bulma admits. She takes a sip from a steaming mug perched at the side of her computer—Vegeta isn't sure what the drink is, but the smell is bitter and potent and immediately piques his interest. “I stayed up late trying to get some work done, guess I ended up pulling an all-nighter. You'll be happy to know I'm looking into some upgrades for the gravity simulator—don't get too excited yet, though, just brainstorming some prototypes right now. Be awhile before I have any working models for you to test. Anyway _—_ is there a reason you're wandering around the kitchen at this time of night?”

“Insomnia,” Vegeta offers tersely, but doesn't elaborate on his usual sleeping habits. “Maybe something to eat.”

“Oh, sure. There's lots of leftovers from dinner in the fridge if you're interested.” She pauses, catching him staring at the mug in her hands. “You want some coffee?”

“I'm unfamiliar with 'coffee.'”

“Oh, you'll like it,” Bulma insists. She moves toward the cupboard, grabbing a second mug, and fills it from a glass pot of dark liquid. “You need any milk or sugar?”

Vegeta blinks at the question.

“Never mind. Try it black.”

Bulma sets the mug down and slips back into her own chair. Vegeta hesitates before taking his own seat at the table. He is unsure of the beverage before him, but decides that the scent is enticing enough.

Slowly, he takes a sip. It's searingly hot, but the taste is dark and rich and not quite comparable to any of the teas and brews he's sampled before.

“Acceptable,” he growls around the lip of his mug.

Bulma takes a sip of her own, chuckling. The sound of her quiet laughter is strangely light in the otherwise dark and quiet kitchen.

“Caffeine's not a great night-time choice, but hey, it'll be morning soon anyway, right? It's either this or nicotine,” she laughs. “Replace one addiction with another...”

Vegeta takes another gulp of his coffee without comment.

Bulma rubs at her eyes with the heels of her hand. “To tell you the truth, I'm not usually the type to stay up like this. I guess I've been a bit of an insomniac myself lately... Every time I try to sleep I keep thinking about that weird kid from the future, you know? These androids that are coming—what if we're not ready when they show up? Not gonna lie, I'm scared out of my  _wits_ about it.”

Vegeta raises an eyebrow, wondering to himself why the woman is so willing to use him of all people as a sounding board for her anxieties.

“I wouldn't be too concerned,” he mutters, watching the eddies of steam in his coffee as he idly rotates his mug. “I'll annihilate those machines so quickly their circuits won't even have time to process what happened.”

“He said they killed _everyone_. Even you, Vegeta.”

“And I'm embarrassed to hear that a version of myself in another timeline was such an abysmal failure,” Vegeta says coolly. “But here? I promise you that won't be happening. You worry about your gravity machines—once I've become a Super Saiyan, nothing will be able stop me.”

Bulma leans back in her chair, folding her arms over her chest, her mouth crooking into a reluctant grin. “You really are a cocky son-of-a-bitch, you know that?”

Vegeta can't resist a smirk from behind his mug.

“So I've been told.”

 

x

 

She appears at his doorway late in the night, and though Vegeta's turned away, facing the window, he senses her ki before she arrives. Her ki is faint, little more than a small, flickering spark—but it only dawns on Vegeta then that he can even read Bulma Briefs's barely detectable ki signature at all.

He doesn't remember filing that particular bit of information away.

He gives her a sidelong glance from his spot by the window, but he doesn't ask her the purpose of her visit. She seems to keep finding new excuses to show up uninvited to his quarters, and none have sounded particularly convincing to him yet.

He doesn't suspect malice, but he wonders all the same.

“What are you looking at, anyway?” There's a teasing undertone in her voice. “This isn't the first time I've seen you standing at that window this time of night.”

Vegeta doesn't answer. He lifts his hand and beckons her to come forward. She moves toward him, and Vegeta is already pointing toward the sky.

“Do you see that constellation?” he asks. “Your planet calls it 'Leo,' apparently.”

Bulma squints. “Uh, yeah, I see it. It's hard to see it well in the city, but yeah. Why? Can't say I pegged you for an astronomer, Vegeta.”

Vegeta ignores the jab. “The brightest star in that constellation. Thirty degrees north of it, roughly—that's where Planet Vegeta's sun is.”

Bulma looks away from the window, turning her gaze to Vegeta.

“Obviously it's invisible to the naked eye,” he explains, mistaking her wide-eyed glance for confusion. “It's more than ten thousand light-years away from here. Because nothing notable in this galaxy is anywhere near this backwater of a planet, unsurprisingly.”

Bulma seems to ponder for a moment. “Ten thousand light-years... that's a pretty long way. That light's been travelling a long time. Hell, if you had a powerful enough telescope, you could still see—” She pauses, grappling with the implications. “You... could still see your planet from this distance.”

Vegeta's jaw clenches, but he says nothing.

 

x

 

He doesn't resist when her lips brush against his throat. He doesn't move when her body settles over his, her hips straddling over his own. When her hand brushes against his cheek, he stiffens completely, his hands white-knuckling into the edge of the bed.

“Look at me,” she whispers, her hand at his jaw.

He resists. He could destroy her in an instant, and he contemplates it, but his power is gone—with every touch he feels like he's burning up cell by cell, his muscles sagging as even his ki leaves him.

He looks at her.

“What are you doing?” he finally manages to ask, his voice barely more than a low hiss in chest.

Her lips are at his neck again, trailing softly up his skin. His fists knot tighter into the bedsheets.

“Nothing you don't want me to,” she whispers against his throat.

He opens his mouth to argue. To remind her who exactly she's laying her hands on. To ask her where her human lover is. A litany of insults waits in his throat, but they die on his tongue when her lips find his, her mouth sealing his own.

Her fingers knot into his hair as she crushes herself against him, her other hand splaying against the tensed muscles of his bare chest. Vegeta doesn't move, _can't move,_ everything frozen save for his shaking hands. Somewhere in the haze rapidly clouding his mind, he vaguely wonders how a mere human is capable of reducing him to this; as far as he knows, the humans have no powers of manipulation, no telepathic control—

Vegeta feels her fingers sliding under the edge of his waistband, and his body stiffens sharply. He grabs her wrist reflexively.

“ _Woman, what do you_ —”

He feels her lips against his ear lobe and fails to stop the shudder that courses through his body like a hot electric current.

“What?” she whispers, kissing at the shell of his ear. Her voice is low, but the teasing tone is unmistakable. “Haven't you done this before?”

A hot flush burns across his face, and he snarls into a kiss before she can say another word. This time his hands knot into her hair, and he crushes their lips together hard enough to bruise.

Soon Bulma is moaning into him, grinding against him, and Vegeta is consumed by the feverish ache that starts somewhere in his chest and burns through his veins. The room is dark and everything is a hot, dim blur as Bulma frees him from his shorts and sheds her own dress to the floor. He pulls her close and her legs wrap around him as she straddles him, and Vegeta clenches his teeth, panting against her throat as he pushes into her.

She takes the lead, crying out as she moves against him, her fingernails clawing hot, red marks into his back. Vegeta doesn't even feel it, only feels how his chest pounds and his blood sings at her touch. He's lost in how her body feels wrapped around his, like a dressing applied to a raw wound.

Soon her moans begin to tremble in her throat. “Vegeta.”

He feels her hips with shaking hands, digs his fingers into her waist.

“ _Again_ ,” he hisses against her ear.

Her moans turn to strained whimpers as he rocks into her. “ _Vegeta._ ”

He wraps his arms around her body, kissing her as he finishes with his last hard, desperate thrusts, and Bulma cries out and shakes against him.

It's a long time before their bodies separate, and Vegeta immediately finds himself aching at the loss. He sees her tangled in his bedsheets, her skin pink and flushed in all the places her body met with his, and before long he needs her again. _And again._ Until the entire night is lost with her, each hour blurring into the next until his veins finally stop burning with the desperate need he can't put a name to.

 

x

 

Weeks pass, and Vegeta finds himself spending fewer nights in the crushing pressure of the gravity room.

He spends fewer still at his bedroom window, searching out stars in Earth's dark, alien sky.

More often he finds himself in her bed, drawn to her like a planet around its sun, and it feels pointless to resist her pull. He memorizes every part of her, her entire body mapped out under his fingertips, her skin and scent and ki seared into his memory like a scar.

It frightens him. He's familiar with obsession—obsession with power, of ascension, of surpassing his enemies and taking what is his—but this is something else, bordering on addiction, and he feels it clouding every part of him. Even during the hours he spends in the punishing crush of the gravity simulator, he feels his blood thrumming for her, and he can't help but search her out. It's foolish—worse, it's undisciplined. And it terrifies him.

He feels he has no choice when he inevitably seals himself into the Capsule Corp ship and leaves Earth without a word.

 

x

 

Vegeta takes a seat at the ship's main console, easing his sore body into the pilot's seat. His muscles ache from a day spent training in intense gravity—but then, maybe it's been more than a day? Alone in the far reaches of space, he finds himself losing track of the hours, especially without any meaningful clock to follow. It seems pointless to observe Galactic Standard, and Earth's time-keeping system still feels awkward to him. He knows by the ship's clock that it's been several of their months since he's left, but measuring time by the cycles of an alien planet's destroyed moon seems like barely more than an abstraction to him.

By any measure, he's been training for too long with seemingly no progress. Skipping from one inhospitable planet to the next, subjecting himself to the bone-crushing effects of the gravity simulator for days on end, and... nothing. He's exiled himself to the bleeding edge of the galaxy, far away from everywhere and yet he feels no closer to his goal.

Nothing, he realizes. Not so much as a flicker of gold in his otherwise black hair.

He leans back in his seat, letting out a slow breath, and closes his eyes. He focuses on the soft hum of the ship, feeling its subtle vibrations move through him like the pulse a soothing, mechanical heart. The lights are dimmed, the ship's power conserved for other priorities, but he takes no issue with the dark.

Slowly, he opens his eyes, his pupils dilating in the sparse light. He gives a cursory glance at several gauges on the console, but finds that every system is working exactly as expected. The woman's handiwork is perfect, of course. He runs a gloved hand across the control panel, his fingertips brushing across the metal as if he might sense part of her in the circuitry—

Vegeta pulls away stiffly, sitting up in his chair and turning towards a nearby screen. He forces himself to remember that there are other matters to attend to. Specifically, the fact that his water and food supplies are running low and he's going to have no choice but to resupply in a matter of days. The water will be easy, with no shortage of icy asteroids and planet rings that can be harvested. But the food, less so. He swipes a hand across the screen, pulling up a chart of nearby systems, and narrows in on several planets known to support ecosystems. He selects the nearest one and quickly charts a new course, feeling a deep lurch as the ship slowly begins to change its thrust. He double-checks his course and notes that he'll be breaching its atmosphere in a little over a day—enough to get some rest, if he can fall asleep.

His course set, he makes a move to push away from the console, but his hand lingers over the screen. With a few quick touches, he brings up a navigational chart, and his fingers hover over a densely packed map of stars. He manipulates the field until one in particular comes into sharp focus, blinking a slow, bright blue that sets it apart from the rest. Beneath it, in Earthling script, he reads the name _Sol._

Vegeta stands up from the control panel and moves toward the nearest window port. The void stretches out before him, a thousand pinpoints of light breaking apart the darkness in constellations he doesn't recognize. He focuses on a single cluster of stars, and then the blackness between them—he can't see it from here, doesn't expect to. But it's out there, and he swears that even at this distance he can feel it.

From the opposite side of the galaxy, he feels the pull of a single, gem-blue planet.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from the song "Venus" by Sleeping at Last (a song that truthfully is way too sappy for this ship, but the lyrics felt fitting enough)


End file.
